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Decision advice on laptop hard drive upgrade.


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Looking for opinions here... I am preparing to do a little work on my 3 year old Dell1520 laptop. Not the prettiest machine nor the lightest, but it still works.

 

My thoughts were to place a 40gb Intel SSD as the main hard drive, and then drop out the DVD burner and put the current hard drive in that slot. I am guessing the main drive is 7200rpm's, if not, I will have to rethink it. I am not at that machine so I can't double check.

 

There was also mention on one of the forums that there might already be a second SATA port and bay inside the 1520 that I can simply plug into. I have not had this machine open before so I don't know for sure.

 

Anyway, so that was my thought. But then I came across this drive...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Hard+Drives+-+Notebooks+/+Laptops-_-Seagate-_-22148591

 

It is a 500gb "hybrid" drive with 4gb of flash memory. The speeds are not as good as the SSD, but it might be a better option, and it is only about $15 more than the pure SSD. The only problem is that I jumped the gun and purchased the Intel SSD from Tiger Direct already, so I would have to pay to have it shipped back, and there might be a restocking fee.

 

Anyway, I just wanted to pick other user's brains on what they would do. In a perfect world I would scrap the 1520 and just invest in a new machine, but I am not ready to send it packing yet.

 

Here are some tested spec's on the Seagate hybrid...

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/first_look

Edited by Crazy Homeless Guy
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I had put SSDs in my desktop about a year ago and was sold on them from that point forward. A few weeks ago I was toying with the idea of getting a new macbook pro and instead decided to just put an SSD in my non-unibody MBP. It's like having a new laptop. I don't have any experience with the hybrid drive you mentioned, but I will vouch for a drive bringing new life to a laptop. I put the 160GB Intel drive in my laptop.

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  • 3 months later...

Finally got around to completing this project. I have had the drive sitting here since the end of June, and the laptop has been sitting on top of the filing cabinet in pieces since early mid Sept.. Nothing like staying on top of things.

 

I disassembled the laptop completely to see if there was a way to fit the SSD drive in without dropping the DVD burner. It has space for it next to the main drive, but no connection. Me thinks this might have been planned as an option at one point, I know it was an option on the 17" version of this laptop.

 

Anyway, that didn't seem to be working, or was going to take skills that were more advanced than what I have to offer. In the end I wound up buying a drive bay caddy that fits into the DVD bay. I placed the mechanical drive in the bay caddy, and installing the SSD as the main drive.

 

I left the internal screw off so that I could pull the mechanical drive, and insert the DVD drive if I really need to burn something. I could try to hot swap them, but I don't want to risk the damage.

 

So far the laptop feels peppy, and handles a lot smoother in disk response time than the 7200rpm disk it was using as the main drive before. I ran the Windows performance test and was not to happy with my scores. I will need to tweak my settings more and try it again. Currently I am getting better performance of the disk and GPU in our netbook. That can't be right though, it is a entry level netbook with a SSD.

 

Anyway, here are my current scores....

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